Providing health care is becoming more complicated and staying apprised of a patient's medical status is oftentimes difficult. Today, medical personnel may rely on a variety of methods to remain informed of their patients' condition. For instance, currently, in order to access medical information associated with a patient(s) admitted to a health care facility, medical personnel (e.g., clinicians) typically may obtain relevant medical information (e.g., surgeries, transfers between medical units, laboratory test results, etc.) from a variety of clinical applications and flowsheets. The relevant information about a patient (surgeries, transfers between medical units, laboratory test results, etc.) is generally scattered throughout a patient record. Some information can be obtained and analyzed by utilizing an electronic flowsheet or a grid layout. These grids may show time across the top of a page and tasks or history associated with medical data across the bottom of a page. Additionally, medical personnel may utilize other parts of the patient chart such as documentation, assessments or Progress Note information to obtain relevant medical information associated with a patient(s) admitted to a health care facility. In either method, it can be difficult and time consuming for the clinician to put together a “patient story” of how the patient has progressed during the current visit.
However, it is typically difficult for medical personnel to easily identify relevant medical information corresponding to a patient(s), such as how patients have responded to certain medications, for example, or whether their vital signs have responded to certain medications, because clinicians typically have to search and evaluate lots of data to find relevant information associated with a patient. As such, using grids or flow sheets to identity relevant medical information associated with a patient may result in inefficiencies within a health care facility due to the time that it takes to retrieve and locate relevant information and due to the information that is not available on the grid or flowsheet. Moreover, the use of grids or flow sheets may create opportunities for medical personnel to make mistakes or errors which may result in deterioration of a patient's health since medical personnel typically would be required to search and evaluate substantial amounts of data when using a grid or flow sheet as described above.
Additionally, using grids and flow sheets, as well as other existing mechanisms, do not provide an easy manner in which medical personnel may obtain a picture or summary view of a patient's health or determine a patient's status or progress in their care, for example determining what surgeries that a patient(s) had, determining when the surgeries occurred, and/or identifying key medical events that have occurred regarding the patient(s) at glance. Furthermore, sorting through different applications or different pages is time consuming and may provide an opportunity for medical personnel to make errors.
Thus, a need exists to provide a more efficient mechanism of gathering or retrieving medical information associated with one or more patients and compiling that medical information and providing the medical information in a picture or summary view so that medical personnel can more easily determine when medical events or procedures associated with a patient(s) have occurred or are planned to occur some time in the future. Additionally, a need exists to summarize clinical data for a quick picture of a patient(s) status and story.